Fringe Film in Canada

by Mike Hoolboom

Mike Hoolboom Everybody loves the movies. But what of movies made about the colour red, or an isolated mountain range, or a woman grown so thin the world floats through her perfect transparency? "You know what would be really great, to make a two-hour movie about Taylor Mead's ass." That's what Andy Warhol remarked, the most notorious fringe filmer of them all. Welcome to the strange and wonderful universe of fringe cinema, where the only rules left unbroken are the ones that have been forgotten. Long before MTV, before Sex, Lies and Videotape, these artists were exploring their own worlds.

Sixteen of Canada's finest sound out about their work. Each of these makers is concerned with shaping, with the way our experience is converted into images or imaginations. And just as no two imaginations are alike, or the lives of any two people identical, these artists have forged new grammars of cinema in order to glimpse new futures, and to fashion new histories. What was it that Dylan wrote? That to live outside the law you must be honest. For each of these artists, spared the unremitting glare of starlight, cinema is a personal practice developed in baths that chemists call solutions, giving shape to the strange new times they see around them.

Those interviewed in the book include:

Each in-depth interview explores the processes, the politics, and the personal adventures that have inspired their making.

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